Nimble Storage at $100 million Run Rate in Bookings

Nimble Storage, Inc. surpassed a $100 million run rate in bookings in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year ending January 31, 2013, after just two-and-a-half years of commercially shipping its products.

In addition to achieving annual sales growth of over 400%, Nimble has quadrupled its number of customers, surpassing the 1,100 mark, and has shipped more than 2,000 systems to date.

The company also has increased its global reach by expanding its presence in Europe and entering the AsiaPac region with a presence in Australia and Singapore.

Global employee headcount is now over 340, with substantial investments made in sales, engineering and operations personnel.
 
"This was a significant milestone for us in both sales and customer momentum," said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage. "Our customers have validated the growing demand for hybrid flash storage arrays and the strength of Nimble Storage’s position against large incumbent vendors. Our founding premise, and the philosophy that every Nimble employee has held from the very beginning, is that we have the potential to build the next great storage company. Following that belief, Nimble has built not only groundbreaking products but also the infrastructure and sales funnel needed to deliver on its mission to make the world’s most efficient data storage solution for enterprises."
 
Products
Nimble Storage has developed an integrated flash-optimized storage architecture designed to leverage the best of flash performance and the price/capacity of high-capacity HDDs. Scale-to-fit technology, built on the Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture, provides customers efficiency for managing their storage performance, capacity and scalability.
 
During the last year, Nimble Storage expanded its product line, added technology innovations and increased its industry partnerships.

Products

• With more than 2,000 storage arrays shipped to date, has demonstrated the demand for hybrid storage technology.
• Shipped over 10PB of hybrid flash storage in the last quarter.
• The CS400 was brought to market to provide a performance storage array designed to host enterprises’ most demanding applications and workloads; it is capable of supporting hundreds of VMs or thousands of VDI users on each array.

• Delivered the scale-to-fit architecture, which allows customers to protect their investment by enabling them to scale capacity by adding additional storage shelves, to scale performance by upgrading the compute function to achieve greater throughput and IOPS, and to expand cache with larger SSDs to handle more active data. Scale-to-fit provides customers with flexibility to scale capacity and/or performance at the lowest incremental cost.

Industry Partnerships
Nimble Storage has developed strategic partnerships with VMware, Cisco and CommVault to provide reference architectures that have been tested for interoperability, performance and deployment. Nimble Storage SmartStack for VDI with VMware and Cisco and SmartStack for Data Protection with CommVault meet the standards of each company to ensure an easy deployment and high ROI for joint customers.
 
"Independent storage companies that reach a $100 million run rate are on a short list within the market, which positions Nimble Storage as a top competitor," said Laura DuBois, program VP for IDC’s storage practice. "The demand for I/O-intensive capacity is growing at a compounded rate of over 75% annually, and Nimble is poised to take advantage of this exploding market with its hybrid storage architecture."
 
Awards and Accolades in 2012:

• The Wall Street Journal‘s The Next Big Thing: Nimble Storage made this list based on its capital, executive experience and investor know-how, which enable it to succeed and make waves in the storage industry.
• Storage Magazine/SearchStorage Product of the Year Finalist: The CS400 was named a finalist in the "Enterprise Storage System" category.
• The CRN Emerging Vendor List: The company made the list for the second time; it recognizes the most innovative vendors that not only deliver technology that is easy to use but also can generate high margins for solutions providers.

Customer Adoption
Customer growth is consistent across all major vertical industries, including government, education, financial services, legal, healthcare and cloud storage providers. Customers include diverse set of names such as Northamptonshire Police, one of the United Kingdom’s largest police force, Mulvanny G2, the #3 worldwide architecture firm, Plaxo, the originator of the smart address book, Kinaxis, in supply chain management, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Transtar automotive supply, Walton Arts in cultural entertainment, Celina Insurance, and University of Colorado, Boulder.
 
"I have had a very positive experience with Nimble Storage from start to finish, and continue to be impressed by the momentum the company continues to gain as it grows while maintaining its personal connection to its customers," said Daniel Kwong, Sacramento City College.
 
Partnerships
Since its inception, Nimble Storage has maintained a channel-centric business model. In 2012 the company increased reseller partnerships over 500% and expanded its partners beyond local resellers to include regional, national and international partners. It drives more than 95% of its revenue through the channel and in 2012 further increased referral sales and the depth of its alliance technology partnerships. Due to the attractiveness of the Nimble Storage Partner Program, the company has increased its partner base to more than 400 partners worldwide.
 
"Nimble Storage’s solutions offer customers a secure, reliable and flexible storage architecture that meets the needs of government agencies," said Robert R. Moore, VP of Carahsoft Technology Corp. "Nimble’s flash-optimized hybrid storage solutions offer our sales reps and reseller partners a competitive edge in the market and help us drive sales."